Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

current and how it plays across the pylons on all sides of the twins’ subaqueous basement.

The outside corner is covered in metallic fins like artificial barnacles. She is about to pause and zoom in order to get a better look when, in perfect unison, they all shift, sliding past one another like scissor blades, revealing themselves to be perfectly interleaved.

They’re heat sinks, Quinn realizes. On the other side of the wall, Quinn envisions processors slotted and locked on thin layers of thermal paste. The external blades must occasionally sheer away algae, which might otherwise reduce heat exchange. The twins are using the Persian Gulf to liquid-cool their rig.

As flat objects are wont to do in water, the handset meanders. Only one corner of the basement bristles with the grid of heat sinks; the rest, like topside, is transparent. Crawling along the wall is a long, blunt-nosed, algae-swallowing bot, the glass perfectly clean and free of debris in its wake. The video frame abruptly swings with a sudden flourish of strong undertow as the descent slows. And then, there they are.

Pause.

The twins are lying in adjacent capsules in the center of the room, their naked bodies submerged in phosphorescent gel.

Draw and zoom.

Open eyes, electrode nets over buzz-cut heads, limp and fallen to the side in a way that does not convey life.

Pan.

Transdermal patches on biceps, unifying tattoos on forearms, and small fine fingers tightly entwined.

But somehow Quinn knows that that is not all. She continues to pan until the frame lands on the pixelated blackness beneath the stairs, and inside it she discerns the tall slender figure of a man. There is a long, lithe knife in his left hand and his eyes are dark and calm. Anyone descending would never know he was there. Someone inexperienced enough to forget to clear the room would rush to the twins’ sides to check to see if they were still alive and never see what was coming up from behind.

Quinn’s metaspecs are off and she is on her feet, pushing her way to the back of the ferry, where she is just in time to see the Dragonfly lift off. She tracks it, expecting it to pass overhead and to overtake her on its way to shore, but she can tell from the direction it takes that her man is headed not toward the dock, but straight for the airport.

23

  DIVERSION

UPON ENTERING IRANIAN airspace, you are expected to relinquish control of your aircraft to the Civil Aviation Organization of the Islamic Republic. If you do not, they will take control through various methods of line-of-sight and satellite communication disruption. If that doesn’t work—if you have proactively hardened your aircraft against the latest in bypass signal hacking—they will scramble two Russian-built, twin-engine, supersonic fighter jets to either escort you to the nearest landing strip, where you will be inhospitably greeted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, or fire a couple of R-77 air-to-air missiles directly up your ass. All depends on who’s in charge that day, and what kind of mood he’s in.

In most cases, after verifying that they can assume at-will control of your aircraft, they hand it right back. The CAO doesn’t have the time, the manpower, or the desire to land your plane for you. That’s your job. That’s what you get underpaid for. They just want to know that they could plunge you into the Caspian Sea if they felt like it. And, of course, they want to make sure that you know that, too.

But every now and then, after remote control of your plane has been assumed, it is not relinquished. Sometimes, in the foreboding tranquility of complete radio silence, your supersonic Emirates Executive ultra-luxury private jet is diverted from Imam Khomeini International Airport, on the outskirts of the capital, to an isolated runway at Mehrabad International Airport, well inside Tehran proper, and subsequently met not by Iranian military, but by the Ministry of Intelligence. By men not in fatigues, but in black tactical gear and full-face ski masks.

When that happens, experienced pilots know exactly what to do. Hands go directly into laps, folded like a proper British nanny’s. No additional announcements are issued over the PA. Sometimes you make a quick trip to the toilet so that you don’t piss yourself during what you know is coming. If there’s time, your copilot will probably go relieve himself as well, and when the two of you are recounting the story later to a couple of hijabed hotties over tea and hookahs, both of you will leave that part out.

By the time the combination hatch and stairway has been fully lowered, the pilot knows to be on his knees facing the nose of the plane with his hands laced behind his head, while the copilot lies face-down splitting the difference between the cockpit and the galley, hands similarly intertwined, mouth full of Persian rug wool. Whatever their passengers choose to do is up to them. It’s their asses. The jet’s insured, and all those soft-touch surfaces are treated with Scotchgard, so if they feel like being heroes, that’s their business.

The men who beset the jet show their appreciation for the pilots’ cooperation by not killing them. However, what they do not appreciate is a completely empty cabin. Which, after a moment of swiveling their black-masked heads in bewilderment, they proceed to verify via rigorous ransacking. It’s no good asking the pilots what happened to the man they are looking for—the man who, according to very credible intelligence, boarded the jet at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar—because the two of them are so scared that they’re still about to piss themselves despite both having recently emptied their bladders. And because hard data is both more expedient and more reliable than a couple of glorified bus drivers.

As expected, the flight computer tells them everything they need to know. Just after entering Iranian airspace, the logs show that the rear emergency hatch was open for a little under